A manager's page is provided as part of the CGI in order to let the system administrator change settings in the user.dat files. On this page it is possible to change any setting for a wildcard selection of users, and to perform other managerial tasks.

To access the manager's page, enter the following url:

http://my.site.com/cgi-bin/webmail.cgi?cmd=manager

In order to access the manager's page you will be required to setup a managers password, follow the instructions of the managers login page.

WebMail's management page has underwent a reconstruction in v3.1o. An example of the new manager's page (after entering the password) is shown below:

As you can see the manager page is broken up into 7 main sections:

WebMail Registration

You can now register WebMail on the managers page allowing much easier and quicker method.

Customization

some quick and simple customizable settings,like LOGO, background colors etc.

Initial Setup

This allows you to setup the default user settings, and simple webmail.ini settings.

Manager Funcitons

These functions allow you to change, modify and delete use information within WebMail. These functions should be used with care.

WebMail Log Files

This allows you to see what webmail log files are setup and able to view some of them.

WebMail Stats Files

This allows you to see a number of different stat information about webmail users and setup. The 'User Information (more)' option display what tpl/color and browsers your users are using.

Other

Other common links you might need.

Limiting spam is more designed to be part of the mail server to enforce spam limits. But WebMail does have a few ini setting which helps in limiting spam and help in locating who is attempting to spam using webmail. Also the ability to track the users IP is also available in v3.1m and higher.

max_email_rcpt 200
max_email_sends 600
max_email_total 600

x_originating_ip true

max_email_ip_record 10

The first 3 ini settings are used to limit the number of emails the use can send in a 24hr period. In the above case the user can send out 600 emails a day where no one email can have more than 200 rcpts.

The difference between the 2nd and 3rd settings is that the '.._sends' is the number of emails allowed to be sent by the user. Where each email can have mutiple rcpts. The '.._total' is the max number of 'rcpts' within the 24 hour period.

For example if you did not have '_total' setup the user could in theory send out 600 emails each having 200 rcpts each. The '_total' is the limit the overall numbers so that a user can send out 3 emails each with 200 rcpt or any combo of this up to 600 emails each sending to only 1 person.

The 4th setting is now the default for all new systems from v3.1m and onwards. What this does is on every email which is sent out the IP of the user will be attached as an email header. This allows spammers to be much located much quicker.

The last ini setting is the number of IP's the CGI will keep track of for each user. It will keep a count on each IP on the number of sent emails when that IP is being used.

In The user.dat file for a user might look like this:

email_ips 1.2.3.4 0Million 4
email_ips 10.0.0.1 0Million 98
email_ips lynden 0Million 4

In the above example the user has used 3 seperate IP address and send a total of 106 emails. The total of these do not get reset so this is total is counted at the point when this was enabled.

WebMail supports bulletins where only WebMail users will see them, so you can tell WebMail users about the latest changes and updates to WebMail, or any other information that you want WebMail users to have.

There are a few ini settings which are used for bulletins. These are:

bulletin_path /var/spool/webmail/bulletins
bulletin_users lynden,ralph,adim*
bulletin_dflt_time 30
bulletin_max_time 30

The 'bulletin_path' must be setup and the directories exist in order for bulletins to work. This is where all the bulletin Emails are stored. The 'bulletin_users' are the list of users that are allowed to send bulletins. The last two settings are used to determine how long the bulletin will last before it is removed automatically.

The 'send_bull.tpl' template is used to send a bulletin message. The template 'bulletin.tpl' is the template that lists the current bulletins available. When sending a bulletin, you can specify the list of users that will receive this bulletin if you wish. The default is that all users receive the bulletin.

When there are bulletins that users have not seen before, they are automatically shown the bulletin list when they login instead of the Email list. In this way they are forced to see at least the subject of the bulletin. When using the frames template, the 'frame.tpl' has the code that redirects the page.

ie. ||ifdef||display_bulletin||
        <frame src="||action||?cmd=bulletin&utoken=||utoken||" name="list">
    ||else||
        <frame src="||action||?cmd=list&utoken=||utoken||" name="list">
    ||endif||

When using non-frames the template change is done internally by the CGI.

This feature has been disabled in WebMail when used with SurgeMail due to a mutiple machine mirror issue which is currently being looked into.

If you are using WebMail with SurgeMail and you only have 1 WebMail machine, then you can add this webmail.ini setting to re-enable this feature:

WebMail supports the use of public address books. This allows users (or administrators) to set up address books that other users can to access. Below are the steps to creating a public address book.

1. You generally want to create an account specifcally for the public address books (we'll call this account "address@your.domain").
2. Log in to the address@your.domain acount and create address book(s) that you'd like to have available to everyone. You need to prefix the names for all publicly available address books with "pub_", so you could call them something like "pub_management" and "pub_company" or whatever names make the most sense to your situation. (make sure you add some addresses to each address book after creating them or they will not be saved).
3. To let all users see the public address books from this account, you will need to add one of the following lines to your webmail.ini (depending on your particular setup). this setting specifies which user's address books are to made public to everyone:
       gaddr_books address
       gaddr_books address@your.domain
   The gaddr_books setting can be a comma seperated list of users if you require more than one.
4. if using a version older than 3.1q build 9, you will not be able to set gaddr_books line in your webmail.ini file, you will need to set it in the user.dat files for all users that you'd like to give access to the public address books. This can be done using webmail's manager interface available by adding "?cmd=manager" to the URL you use to access webmail, e.g "http://your.domain/scripts/webmail.exe?cmd=manager".

Note: If you only want a particular group of users to have access to a public address book, you can only modify those user.dat files using the manager's page as above.

WebMail version 2.0g and higher supports the use of external global address books. This allows the CGI to talk to the external program, which in turn talks to the external address book.

The external address book is a globally accessible address book which you can ask for queries. Only the administrator can change and/or update the data. This is normally done with some other external program. Users can only read the information.

The main example is setting up your external address book in an LDAP server storing the users information.

You can download a LDAP version the ldap interface from the below links

To setup webmail to use the above program you will need to download and place the file in your webmail's workarea.

In the same location you will need to create a extern_book.ini file with fields like this.

The uncomment/change the ini file to include the fields you wish to allow to view and perform searches on.

Then add to webmail.ini file the following settings to enable this feature.

The interface and details of the external address book protocol used can be found at: External Address Book.

SurgeMail v2.2c10 and higher does have a simple LDAP server which you can use this external LDAP module to talk to. The LDAP server within SurgeMail lists all the Surgemail Users.

See the following URL on how to enable ldap in SurgeMail.